Author Archive: Armin Seuchter

Being passionate about software, Armin joined FavBrowser.com in early 2011 and has been actively writing ever since. Having accepted the challenge, he also enjoys watching anime, indulging in good books, staying fit and healthy, and trying new things.

The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal came up with it as a practical avocation for the day after Thanksgiving, when many people are paying their folks at home a visit.

Madrigal proposes that if you cannot dissuade your parents from keeping Internet Explorer 6 because YouTube will stop working, “wait until they slip into a tryptophan induced coma and then sneak into the den.”Continue Reading

Mozilla is making progress on adding a silent update mechanism to Firefox, with plans to integrate the new service in Firefox 10 early next year. One of the developers working on the feature cautioned that silent update might slip, however.

At this point, we’re not quite sure which version of Firefox this will land in…We’re working to land it as soon as is safely possible. - Ehsan Akhgari, a Firefox engineer in charge of one of the silent update components, said in a blog post last weekend.

A small group of website and mobile app developers recently started off an “Occupy Flash” campaign in the hope of putting an end to Adobe’s popular browser plug-in.

The group, which launched a website earlier this week, said its goal was to “Get the world to uninstall the Flash Player plug-in from their desktop browsers.”

Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of Web technology. - The Occupy Flash site

Maxthon recently released the newest stable version of their browser, bringing along several improvements, new features, and fixes. Some of these had previously been introduced in beta builds 3.2.1.600 and 3.2.1.1200. Find below a summary of the changelog.

The latest Google Chrome beta supports multiple sign ins, allowing users to have their own apps, bookmarks, and settings in the browser. This is great for people who do not want to create multiple OS profiles, or for people with separate accounts for business and personal use.

Once you’ve installed the Chrome beta, you can set up multiple profiles in the options menu, under Personal Suff, by clicking “Add New User.” This automatically generates a nickname and an avatar for the user, both of which can be modified. Users can also sign into their Google accounts from the options menu to fetch Chrome settings from the cloud.Continue Reading

$26,511 were paid out by Google to researchers who made the search giant aware of some of the 18 Chrome vulnerabilities that were taken care of recently. 11 of the 18 vulnerabilities received the second highest rating on Google’s danger meter, namely “high,” while three were classified as “medium” and another four were pegged as “low.”

The $26,511 were paid out to four researchers, two of which were Sergey Glazunov and “miaubiz” who earned $13,674 and $10,337 respectively. Being regular Chrome vulnerability finders, they account for 57% of all bug payments this year. An amount exceeding $170,000 in bounties has been paid out by Google so far for the year of 2011. Set more than two months ago, the previous bounty amounted to $17,000.Continue Reading

Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, voiced his discontent about the browser at a public hearing this week, while Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, urged Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for more clarity regarding the data collected from Silk users. The reason for the outrage had to do with how everything a user did in Silk, Amazon would know about. This isn’t the first time that Silk has caused privacy concerns to arise either.

Markey went into a bit more detail in a letter addressed to Amazon, stating that Silk is the only browser available for Silk and that Amazon could essentially keep track of each and every click its customers make. This includes knowing where people shop, what products they buy, when they buy them, and how much they pay.Continue Reading

The latest additions to Nokia’s phone portfolio, the C2-05 and the X2-05, come with a new browser that uses Nokia’s own compression technology to deliver content faster, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.Continue Reading